Philip Weiss

James Parker in Wisconsin and California

A page from a compiled genealogy of the Parkers

I’ve previously written about Patrick Parker and his wife Mary Murphy. One of the family legends passed on to me by other researchers was that they had a son names James who went off to California, never to be heard from again.

There is a James Parker who appears in the 1852 Census of Canada in the vicinity of Patrick Parker’s family. He’s born about 1832 in Ireland. However, that census does not list relationships so there’s no telling if he’s a son or some other relation to Patrick. In the 1860 US Census, there’s a James Parker living with Patrick Parker’s family in Glen Haven, Wisconsin. The age listed would put his year of birth about 1832, also in Ireland. Listed below him are Ellen, John and Napolean Parker. The 1860 US Census also does not list relationships, so it’s not certain how they relate to Patrick either. But the placement is typical of an adult son who has married but is still living in the same household as his parents. It’s not certain by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s the most likely possibility.

James, Ellen, John and Napolean Parker in Glen Haven, 1860 — James, Ellen, John and Napolean Parker in Glen Haven

I’ve researched all the other children of Patrick Parker and Mary Murphy who showed up in the United States, and have had some luck with tracking many of their descendants who lived mostly in Iowa. But this James disappeared after 1860.

And last night I found something intriguing. There appears to be a very similar entry for another James Parker in San Joaquin Township, Sacramento County in California, also in 1860.

James Parker in San Joaguin — James, E., John, and N.J. Parker in San Joaquin

Listed with this James Parker are an E., a John, and an N.J. Parker. They have similar ages, though slightly different. They are listed as from Canada and Wisconsin rather than Ireland and Wisconsin. But remarkably similar overall. At this point, I don’t have anything to corroborate this record.

It was at this point that I started writing this post, thinking that I had a something interesting to follow up on for later.

However, as I am wont to do, I added this to my Ancestry.com tree for James Parker. I treat my Ancestry.com tree as a database of possibilities. I’ve even posted a note on it warning other people they should copy my tree at their peril. When I posted this census entry to the family of James Parker, Ancestry went to work and started matching new records. Now that they live in California, it starts ranking California based records higher in its sort. Nothing popped up for James Parker, but four new census entries showed up for John Parker, born in 1858 in Wisconsin and living in California.

The first of these is a John Parker living in Santa Barbara in 1900 with wife Margaret and children John Warren, Mary Ellen, James Galen, and Ruth M. Now, this is also no guarantee that this is the same John Parker. In fact, the link was tenuous enough that I did not add the record to my entry for John Parker even with the database of possibilities caveat. It would just be too hard to unwind if it turned out to be wrong. So I created a new, disconnected family for a new John Parker and recorded it. If the research was a dead end, I could just delete them all, I wouldn’t have to disconnect them from the known Parker tree, and everything would be good.

I also added the 1910 US Census entry for the family (image not included with this post). This one had the same children, except that Mary Ellen is listed as Inez in 1910. Other people on Ancestry had added these two census records to families headed by a John Parker and Margaret Miscall.

The next step in this bread crumb trail of discovery is an entry in Ancestry.com’s California Death Index. The California Death Index is just a list of death certificates that were filed with the state between 1940 and 1997. It’s not a dispositive record without seeing copies of the underlying certificates, but I’ve generally had good luck with the index being correct. I haven’t seen the errors for the database that I’ve seen with other transcriptions.

The entry that I found was this:

Name:	Mary Elleninez Gerard
[Mary Elleninez Parker] 	
Social Security #:	563325739
Gender:	Female
Birth Date:	1 Nov 1890
Birth Place:	California
Death Date:	5 Jun 1981
Death Place:	Orange
Mother's Maiden Name:	Miscall
Father's Surname:	Parker

Mary Elleninez Gerard (neé Parker)? That looks really promising, I thought to myself. Date of birth matches up, and the parents’ surnames match up with what other people had found for John and Margaret. None of those researchers had linked the record to Mary Ellen Parker however. Nevertheless, I added a husband to her with a last name of Gerard so that Ancestry’s search engine would look for her as part of a Gerard family. Nothing popped up immediately.

And nothing else popped up for any of the other family members at the time either. I haven’t been doing real research in this process. This is just following my nose and poking around. It’s late at night and I should go to bed. However…

Last year my great grand aunt Frances died at the age of 103. In June of this year, I picked up five boxes of photos and other personal effects that had been in her possession from a cousin. I’ve been paying my friend Kim to scan all these items so they’d be available for everyone in the family. One of the items is an album containing photos from what appears to be trips my great grandparents Joe and Frances Weiss took. They visited relatives in Colorado, Illinois and California. And toward the back of the album was a photo of a nun with an inscription that appeared to be Sr. M. Germaine Parker. It’s hard to read.

I’ve thought Sister Parker might be a connection to one of the two missing branches of the Parker family. In addition to James Parker, there’s also another John Parker who went missing in records after 1880. He probably exists somewhere, but John Parker is such an incredibly common name and records from the 1800s are often sketchy. I haven’t found anything that matches up with him.

So I pulled out the album and looked for the photo. Sister Parker looks to be in her 30s or 40s, though it’s quite hard to tell with her habit covering everything except her face. I flipped backward through the pages of the album looking for other photos of her. And then I saw this photo:

Jeanne Margaret and Mary Ellen Gerard – ’21

Gerard! Mary Ellen Inez Parker Gerard! Could these be her children? Must search harder for her! And bingo! In 1920, there’s this census record:

Henry Gerard – 1920 in Los Angeles

Henry and Inez Gerard, living on Gardner Street in Los Angeles with children Jeanne and Mary Ellen, aged 4 and 1¼ years old. Those are the two girls from the photo. And Inez matches up with the daughter of John Parker.

And the most likely reason my great grandparents would be visiting the Gerard family that matches up with this trail is because they are related.

This is just the beginning. I’ll have a lot of hard work to prove all of this. That record for James Parker may be incorrect. James may be a cousin of my great great grandmother Mary Parker and not her oldest brother. James himself may disappear from available records. But my great grandparents did not visit the Gerard family randomly.

This is why family genealogists should research the descendants of their ancestors. The descendants provided the link that may lead to valuable information about James Parker and ultimately my third great grandparents, Patrick and Mary Parker. had I not gone down the tree, James Parker may have remained among the disappeared.

Genealogy and Family History: Class #2

A gave myself a couple of tasks to accomplish yesterday before the second session of my genealogy class. The first was to pick up the class packet from the copy center. The second was to pick up a Husky Card for access to the U.W. libraries. Both went swimmingly, so I got to my class early, hung out and read the text book.

The class was taught by James Rigali today. He’s the instructor for the history portions of the class. Topic was Organizing Historical Research Projects. After an overly long and fairly unimportant discussion of what is history? he delved into a basic method he wanted us to follow:

Pick a subject. At this point, I’m thinking of doing my project on either or both of my third great grandparents, Patrick Parker and Mary Murphy. (I’ve written about them on the blog before.)
Create an annotated chronology
Develop research questions, both historical and genealogical
Develop a bibliography. His overview included the following types of sources:
- General books, including textbooks.
- Scholarly articles (JSTOR)
- Encyclopedias (he didn’t cover this one too much)
- Historical books and magazines published at the time
- Local histories
- Historical maps
- Historical photographs.
- Newspapers of the time
- History web sites
Sample Research Journal

Keep a research journal. He didn’t really cover what to record on this, other than keeping what he called a two-sided journal. In other words, record what you are searching and reading on one side, and notes and thoughts on the other. He didn’t really seem like he’s embraced computer technology like I do.

Genealogy and Family History: Class #1

Tonight was the first session of my Genealogy and Family History class through the Continuing Education office at U.W. I don’t have a whole lot to report about the experience, as we did not cover any academic material today. The first half of the class the instructors reviewed the syllabus and their expectations. None of the work appears to be particularly difficult. Assignments include things like retrieving and printing a page from the census and requesting a vital record.

The second half of the class was dedicated to student introductions. Not so much tell us a little bit about yourself as tell us a little bit about your family. Throughout the introductions, whenever someone mentioned Iowa the genealogy instructor (the other instructor focuses on history) asked what part of Iowa. She mentioned she had a lot of interest in one county. About the 4th time she asked about Iowa, I realized that her name has been ringing a bell in the back of my head, and I realized why. She runs the GenWeb site for Wright County, Iowa. As I’ve documented here, my third great grandparents Patrick Parker and Mary Murphy Parker appeared to have ended up in Iowa. Four or five of their children were in Wright County Iowa, two others in Franklin County, the next county over.

I’m being taught by a person who has expertise in the genealogy and history of a specific county I’m interested in.

Anton Weiss arrival in America

I think I’ve found the correct passenger manifest which shows my great great grandfather Anton Weiss arriving in America.

Anton applied for a passport in 1886 stating that he emigrated from Bremen on 4 Mar 1852, however he forgot the ship’s name.

On 9 Apr 1852 the Agnes arrived in New York from Bremen with an Anton Weiss aboard. He’s 24 years old, from Prussia, and his occupation is mechanic. That’s doesn’t exactly match what I know about Anton Weiss, but it’s reasonably close. Anton was actually 25, from Bavaria, and worked as a tinsmith in the first references to his occupation in the U.S. Anton turned 25 on 27 Feb 1852. He could easily have been 24 when he first registered with the Bremen emigration bureau.

Anton Weiss on the Agnes passenger manifest

What clued me in to the manifest is an entry in the United States Germans to America Index, 1850-1897 for Anton Weiss. That lists a 24 year old Bavarian named Anton Weiss, occupation coppersmith, arriving in New York on the Agnes on 9 Apr 1852. I don’t know why this database lists him as Bavarian rather than Prussian or gives his occupation as coppersmith instead of mechanic. This entry matches what I know about Anton Weiss pretty closely.

Coppersmith, tinsmith, and mechanic would have been very similar occupations in the 1850s. That discrepancy doesn’t bother me.

The discrepancy that bothers me is the scanned microfilm image gives his origin as Prussian. Bavaria and Prussia were were not interchangeable countries in 1852. Indeed, several other passengers have their origin listed as Hesse, Hanover, and Germany. So where the Germans to America Index gets Bavaria, I don’t know. Stuff to research!

Weisses in New Mexico

I have a great great uncle, Frank Weiss, who moved from the family home in Cassville Wisconsin to Pukwana South Dakota. He married Nannie Conaway in 1890, and they had 4 children. Robert died young, and the other three were Marion, Theodore, and Agnes.

I think I just solved some puzzles that in retrospect shouldn’t have been all that difficult to figure out.

The first is that I found a census entry for Nannie Weiss living with Agnes Weiss in Carlsbad, New Mexico in 1920. Nannie and Agnes were also listed in Pukwana in 1920. I found the New Mexico entry several years ago and wondered what that was about. Vacation?

The next part of the mystery is the 1915 South Dakota state census. The only member of the family I could find was Frank Weiss.

1915 South Dakota state census card for Frank Weiss

I figured Marion being missing was because she was attending the University of Illinois, as she graduated in 1917. And maybe Theodore was off working somewhere. And not finding someone in the records in a place I know they should be is very common. Records are spotty. I got a letter just yesterday from the Social Security Administration saying they had no record of my grandfather’s death, so they could not release information about him to me. Missing records are a common problem. I didn’t think too much of the missing members of the Weiss family.

The last puzzle was Agnes’ obituary. It mentioned that Agnes finished 8th grade in Wisconsin and then moved with the family to New Mexico for a few years. For some reason, I never connected that with the other pieces of information. The obituaries for Nannie and the other children never mentioned anything about New Mexico. In fact, Theodore’s said he lived in Pukwana his entire life save for the time he spent in the military.

It appears now that Nannie moved with the kids who were still at home. In 1915, the county assessor who conducted the census didn’t include them because he knew they didn’t live there. But the US Census in 1920 asks who normally lived in the domicile. And to Frank, Nannie and his children normally lived there, so he included them in his responses. At the same time, Nannie also answered the queries as if she normally lived on her own with Agnes in Carlsbad, New Mexico.

The questions the records don’t answer is why Nannie took the kids and moved out for a time? There’s all sorts of possibilities, from domestic trouble to plans for the whole family to move to New Mexico that fell through. Perhaps the family fell on harder times and Nannie took several teaching positions. And why New Mexico?

The last grandchild of Frank and Nannie died last September. A number of great grandchildren are still alive, but none of them were older than 4 years when Nannie died in 1959. Unless Frank or Nannie wrote it down somewhere, I won’t get a chance to hear the story from someone who heard it directly from one of the participants.

That’s why when I meet distant relatives, I don’t ask them about names and dates. I ask them to tell me stories.

Costco detergents

I have bad luck with Costco detergent and cars. Two years ago I had a sweet smell coming from the back of my car that turned out to be one of those big Costco laundry detergent containers having popped open and poured liquid detergent all over the back of my station wagon. Had to pay to have car detailed. Extra even, cause the battery is back there.

Unloaded my car last night and saw a smear of white stuff in the back. I thought it was potato salad. Then I got inside and saw the container of liquid dishwasher detergent which I had unloaded from the car earlier in the day and left on my counter. A large portion of the detergent was in a giant puddle on the counter and a smaller portion dripped over the side onto the floor, all having leaked from a nail sized hole in the side of the container. I’m afraid to go back out to check my car because I don’t want to have to get it detailed again.

2013 Seattle Mayoral Race: Against Kate Martin

Kate Martin’s top priority for transportation is the following: Decongest bus and street car routes to improve reliability. The following blog post talks about how she intends to do that: Congestion Rx

Do you see any solutions in that? I don’t. What I see is a cranky neighbor who’s mad that bus drivers are getting overtime. Please explain to me how reducing overtime will materially improve bus service.

She’s got a few other blog posts on transportation as well.

Less Road Rage, More Comprehensive Transportation Planning

Her solution to road rage? Take bikes off the roads and put them on “Greenways.” I love the idea in theory. In practice, this isn’t going to work for a number of reasons. First, Seattle’s geography means that there are number of choke points where bicycles and vehicles will have to share space. Second, given the realities of cranky car people, bicycle roads are going to be shunted to corridors that are a pain in the ass for bicyclists. Is she going to push to turn Roosevelt way or 15th Northwest from a car through-way to a bicycle through-way? I doubt it. Is she going to make it so that bicycle crossings have equal or higher priority at crossings with cars, or will it be like the Burke Gilman trail where every crossing means bicycles have to stop and wait for a cross-walk light? It’s going to be the latter, and that will make it impractical for bicyclists to commute on a greenway.

Regarding Sound Transit Planning for Lightrail to Ballard

Rather than extend Link to Ballard, Kate Martin wants to add a Sounder Commuter stop in West Ballard. Where those tracks go is nowhere near the population centers of Ballard, and people aren’t going to walk that far. This would mean that the station would need a large garage for Park-n-Riders. The train ride would also put commuters at the Amtrak station at the very south end of downtown. That makes sense for people commuting a long distance (the nearest stations are Longacres and Edmonds) where the distance to offices from the station, while a chunky amount, are but a fraction of the total commute. But for commuters from Ballard who need to get to Belltown or north downtown? They’re not going to want a walk that is as long as their train ride to downtown in the first place. A Link route with stops in Interbay, Ballard proper, Loyal Heights and Crown Hill is going to serve commuters a lot better than a Sounder stop.

Or take for instance her priority of “Rebuild the Seattle Police Department”. Here’s how she would do that: SPD: A Path Forward.

Yup, her main idea is to get a strong leader. Duh. Nothing about body cameras, or tracking race to see if the SPD is biased, or getting people who live in Seattle to be officers, or new training programs. Those are ideas from other candidates. They may or may not work, but they are pro-active ideas at least. Kate Martin? In her other blog post on crime wants to target “incivility”: Crime and public safety. What that amounts to is that she wants all the people that annoy and scare her out of downtown, the poor people, the homeless people, the crazy people. Then women will come downtown again!

Sorry Kate Martin, you are a no go for me. A good portion of your policy ideas are dog-whistle items for NIMBYists, not forward-thinking prescriptions for an urban city.

It’s important to bear in mind I’m being called a …

It’s important to bear in mind I’m being called a traitor by men like former Vice President Dick Cheney. This is a man who gave us the warrantless wiretapping scheme as a kind of atrocity warm-up on the way to deceitfully engineering a conflict that has killed over 4,400 and maimed nearly 32,000 Americans, as well as leaving over 100,000 Iraqis dead. Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein, and King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.

Geni.com becomes evil

Just under three years ago I started researching genealogy as a hobby. My girlfriend suggested Geni.com, and I signed up without knowing much about it. I kind of liked it at first, and even paid for a year’s worth of Geni Pro rather than their free service.

What Geni is trying to do is create one family tree for the entire world. I like that goal.

I don’t like how they’ve gone about it.

The way it worked when I joined was you entered people and information about them, and you became the manager of a profile for them. If you wished, you could merge that profile with a profile for the same person entered by another user. Then the two of you could collaborate on research about that person, jointly managing the profile. Any relative within 4 generations could be designated private, so that other users couldn’t see the information and it isn’t crawled by Google. This allows people to add close, living relatives to their family tree but keep their life details private.

Then a couple years ago, Geni changed policy. If the profile was for a person more than 4 generations back in time (i.e., your great grandparents or earlier in the tree), any Geni Pro user could edit them. This is a huge issue because there are a lot of really sloppy genealogists. I’ve no problem with sloppy research, but when it affects my research, I get cranky. I stopped using Geni for the most part, though I kept my account and periodically edited a profile or two.

Another aspect of Geni is that they have a class of users called curators. Curators are uber-users. They can manage popular profiles (e.g., Queen Elizabeth, Charlemagne) preventing sloppy genealogy work being done on them. They can approve merges made between abandoned profiles. Those are good things, mostly.

But recently, though I’m not sure when, Geni decided that curators should have unfettered access to private profiles. In other words, random genealogists have access to the private information about living people. Presumably the curators are now the unpaid customer service representatives. This is a huge problem!.

Also, those curators can approve merges and edits for private profiles. I had a first cousin entered, and so did someone else. A curator came along and saw that the information matched and merged the two profiles without the permission of either myself or the other person who had entered my cousin. So now that person can see a whole lot of private information I’ve entered where the 4 generations for both of us intersect. What does it matter, you’d think? They’re probably family. Except there was a divorce and I didn’t know the details. Now I can see some of that. And the other person can see similar pieces of information.

Allowing some random curator to decide on their own to make changes to private profiles, including merges, was the final straw. I sent an angry email to Geni and got back a really condescending response that I should ask the sloppy curator for help in fixing the mess that person caused. I replied back that I would do no such thing, that I wanted it back the way it was prior without me having to ask someone nicely. And then I got back another even more condescending response that I didn’t want to work on a collaborative site.

I never replied again. Had I, I would have pointed out that collaboration does not mean what that C.S.R. thought it meant. It does not mean making changes without telling other people affected. Working together means talking and discussing changes, none of which Geni’s designated curator did. Not to mention they shouldn’t have even been able to see private information in the first place.

I spent the next evening removing as much information as I could from Geni. I know they have logs of all the past information, so it’s futile if they decide to become even more evil than they already are. Rest assured Geni when you read this, if you restore that private information and/or make it available to anyone and I find out about it, I will sue. I don’t put it past them. The company has continually decided to make yet more information available to yet more people when people who entered that information did not expect it.

I will never put new information on Geni again. If you care about your family’s privacy, you won’t either.

Update: I saw that a lot of people visited this post from a curator forum discussion on Geni.com. That prompted me to go take a look at Geni’s privacy policy. And again I see they’ve updated it yet again to make previously private information public. Previously, up to four generations from yourself could be kept private. Now they keep private only information about living people. That would be fine if that’s how they started, but as I noted above, they keep changing it to reveal information that was previously private. Like I said: evil.

Quick reaction – Portland Timbers at Seattle Sounders

Tonight’s game against Portland was very disappointing. We were up one to nil for most of the game, and Portland tied it in the 90th minute to eek out a draw. I looked down and missed that last play. Our own goal was a nice play where Steve Zakuani anticipated a Portland pass, intercepted it, ran the length of the field, then placed a cross perfectly at the feet of Eddie Johnson for the score. I think Zak should have received the Man of the Match award, not Eddie.

Oba Martins entered the game around the 70th minute and played well despite almost no practice with the team. Zakuani is starting to look like the Zakuani of old. Andy Rose had a poor game, giving the ball away a lot and holding onto the ball for too many touches. And for god’s sake Sigi, please please please drill Eddie Johnson on getting his head back into the game quickly after a blown play. Blown plays happen. Eddie laying on the field in frustration or slowing walking back onside when the Sounders are mounting another attack is just not cool.

I had great company for the game too.